Rock Pigeon
For Throwback Thursday, here's a bird that's probably associated with our cities more than woods, meadows or wetlands. It's a Rock Pigeon (AKA Rock Dove); I've mentioned before that there's no clear taxonomic difference between doves and pigeons . Technically calling them Rock Doves is slightly old-fashioned; that used to be the common name for the birds (in English) before the American Ornithologists' Union and the British Ornithologists' Union decided to switch to Rock Pigeon for complicated reasons. (The scientific name didn't change so there wasn't a need to get worldwide support for the name change. I don't know if English speakers in Canada, Australia, India, etc. had any input though.) I suppose to be more precise, I could have referred to the bird as a Feral Pigeon , which is a wild version of the Domestic Pigeon , which is in turn a tame version of the Rock Pigeon. (The Feral Pigeon and the Domestic Pigeon together comprise a subspeci...